Back from a short excurison to the verdant Iowa farmland. We took a little road trip to Fairfield, Iowa (see previous post), and all in all it was a great trip. We saw David Lynch and Donovan and we learned about the brain and meditation and creativity and the unified field. The unified field is kind of a big deal. It's something many people from many cultures over many thousands of years have discovered and written about, and it's part of that whole transcendance thing, one of my favorite subjects, and well, we got a full overview of Transcendental Meditation and, I actually took the training many years ago back in the 1970's, so it was a reaffirmation and a rediscovery and some kind of weird time travel for me. And well, I can't say I've been a devoted TMer, but I do meditate often and I have experienced moments of bliss and transcendance, and I'm sure it's changed me and influenced me in ways I'm not even aware of.
I think it's safe to say that everyone in our little group enjoyed the trip. There was something for everyone and there's just something good about getting out of your little routine, pointing a car in a new direction, firing up the cd player and blasting off into the great heartland of the American dream.
And what did I learn? Well, the human game is strange and complicated, but we have everything we need to transform and transcend the madness of our little human dramas. Sitting quiet, closing our eyes, finding a calm center - it's easy, simple and well, it can change everything. This is available to us all. Transcendance is in our heads, or maybe as Stevie Winwood once sang in the classic Traffic tune, "heaven is in your mind."
All the great insights seem to me to be simple acts, not really the intellectual lightning bolts, just the simple moment, the simple act. And so, we asked David Lynch some questions, we listened to Donovan sing, we slept well and kind of recharged. Not a bad way to spend a couple days...
The only unasked mystery question, the only one I just didn't have the heart to ask David Lynch, as per Billie Bob Thornton in "Dead Man": "how do you get your hair to go like that?"